After the short temporary popularity of foreign currency denominated (FXD) loans, during the Great Financial and Economic Recession (2007- 2013), the burden of these loans has become unaffordable for a lot of borrowers in East Central Europe. We have designed a family of simple models to compare...

This paper provides an overview of the antecedents, main drivers and spillover mechanisms of the turbulence emanating from the US sub-prime credit market in the summer of 2007. Its primary goal is to discuss the facts and interrelationships featured in the various analyses and statistics in a...

Due to an EU directive, with tight deadlines, the Hungarian government has to work out program, including a pension reform. The plan is to be discussed publicly and made into a law. The last public and detailed pension package was a Working Paper of the National Bank of Hungary, 2016, which...

Studying the age-dimension of the probability distribution of pensions while assuming steadily rising real wages and time-invariant benefit-rules, two factors play important roles: (i) the weight of the wages in indexation of benefits in progress; (ii) the longevity gap. Factor (i) acts against...

As part of the Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP, 2023), the Hungarian government pledged to reform the pension system. The main themes are sustainability and adequacy. The pension plan is to be discussed publicly and put into law by March 2025. The last detailed official pension study was the...

In Hungary, average initial old age pensions have risen much faster than average pensions over the past decade. Several factors have contributed to this, of which the method of valorization and official earnings statistics are of particular importance. In most countries, initial pensions are...

Public pensions are indexed to prices or wages or to their combinations; therefore, the impact of inflation on the real value of benefits can often be neglected, especially under indexation to prices. At high and accelerating/decelerating inflation like currently prevailing in Hungary, however,...

John von Neumann (Budapest, 1903-Washington D.C., 1957) was an exceptional polymath, who made fundamental contributions to mathematical logics, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, game theory, computer architecture and automata theory. In this brief paper, I shall review the game-theoretic...

In Hungary, initial pensions are indexed to average net wages, reported by official earnings statistics (ES), which does not cover the economy as whole. However, there is alternative statistical source on labour income, the national accounts (NA), intended to cover the total economy. The latter...

The traditional approach to flexible retirement (e.g. NDC) neglects the impact of asymmetric information on actuarial fairness (neutrality). The mechanism design approach (e.g. Diamond, 2003) gives up the requirement of neutrality and looks for a redistributive second-best benefit-retirement-age...